


Soap

by Aliana



Series: Do No Harm [10]
Category: Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Anachronistic, Gen, Gondor, Minas Tirith, Third Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-18
Updated: 2012-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-02 02:59:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliana/pseuds/Aliana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beren goes on the worst date ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soap

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LiveJournal in fall 2006. A gapfiller to [Fallen](http://archiveofourown.org/works/364151/chapters/591380).

It's Tuesday, and Tarondor's dead. Orc blade to the neck; nothing for it. They'll take him away and pile him on the fire. And Beren stands alone outside the ward and thinks, Jesus, this is going to hurt.

But not right now. Right now he's built up this beautiful soap bubble of denial, little rainbow patches swimming around on the glycerine surface. Right now, Tarondor is not dead; he's only sleeping curled up on his side in the barracks, or helping the men on the lower circles, biting his lower lip the way he always does when he's fighting or reading Nietzsche. He'll be back soon, and accordingly, the bag Beren holds is not full of Tarondor's snapshots and pocket knives and paperbacks which he will have to give to his mother and his sisters (if Beren ever sees them again).

Nope.

Beren's not stupid, of course; it's all going to burst sooner or later (probably sooner), and it's going to hurt like nothing else, but for now he's made himself comfortable inside. He's set up camp and he's going to stay for as long as he can.

*

In the afternoon he spots the girl who was taking care of Tarondor. She did a nice job; very professional. All of the girls here are very impressive in that regard.  
  
"Hey," he says.  
  
"Hey. How's your forehead?"  
  
"Fine, thanks." He touches the bandage. "Listen, I was wondering…what are you up to tonight?"  
  
She shrugs. "Not much. Thinking about death, probably."  
  
"Oh." He pauses and licks his lips. "That's heavy." She needs a big, damn bubble too, he thinks. She needs some soap of her own.  
  
"It gets old sometimes."  
  
"Well, why don't I take you out for dinner, instead?"  
  
"Dinner?" She looks as though he's suddenly speaking to her in Haradric or Catalan.  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"How do you know I'm not married?" The way she says it, the question is neither flirtatious nor disapproving.  
  
"You don't look married."  
  
"How do you mean?"  
  
"I don't know. You just don't. And even if you are married I won't give you any problems."  
  
She puts one hand on the back of her head. She must do that a lot, he thinks, because her cap is smudged faintly with blood. "Since the evacuations, everything's been shut down. There's not really anywhere…" Then she pauses with a thoughtful look on her face. "Well, there  _is_  Crazy Lou's."

*

All of the Minas Tirith café-owners and bistro-owners and sandwich-shop owners have locked up their shops and boarded their windows and left their menus and aprons behind to gather dust. All of them, that is, except for Crazy Lou. And this is because he is crazy.  
  
The walls are covered floor-to-ceiling with yellowing newsprint; sometimes words or phrases are highlighted or circled with no particular logic of choice. Even the insides of the windows are plastered over with paper, which has grown thin and translucent to let the light in between the words. On the wall directly above Beren's and the girl's table there is a large stuffed giraffe's head, a Christmas wreath hanging about its long, slender neck. Its glassy eyes are permanently half-opened in a state of lazy appraisal. The speckled formica tabletop looks like it ought to be sticky, but when Beren runs his palm over it, it is clean and smooth. In the center of each table is a lumpy candle, though the whole restaurant is lit up in florescent like a convenience store.   
  
Lou himself comes over to greet them. He is a short man with impeccable posture. Today he is dressed in a tuxedo jacket and green pinstriped trousers, and a chartreuse beret sits at a painterly angle on his head. Sewn on to the beret is one patch with a peace sign on it, and another with a large hemp leaf.  
  
"Hello, dear little ragamuffins," he says.  
  
"Hello, Lou," they reply.  
  
"Here are your menus, my dainty geese." And with that he leaves to saunter over to a table full of moustached artillery-guys in the opposite corner of the room.  
  
"This is not a menu," Beren says. "This is a hardback edition of  _Atlas Shrugged_."  
  
"My menu is a tennis ball," says the girl.  
  
"Hmph."  
  
"Do you like sushi?" she asks him. She has taken off her cap and her smock, but otherwise she is dressed the same as she was this afternoon. "You look like you like sushi."  
  
"Sure."  
  
"Tuesday night is usually sushi night."  
  
"Okay."  
  
They sit in silence. Beren flips the pages of  _Atlas Shrugged_ , then he turns the lumpy candle in a circle.  
  
"You can say something," he says after a few minutes. "Why aren't you saying anything?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"Really?"  
  
"I'm not saying anything," she says, bouncing the tennis ball on the tabletop, "because you're not saying anything. And I think you're not saying anything because you're thinking about your friend. But I don't want to ask because I don't want to make you upset." She shrugs. "But now you're probably upset," she adds hastily. "I'm sorry."  
  
"That's all right." It's perfectly fine to think about Tarondor, because Tarondor is undoubtedly sitting in the mess hall chatting with the guys and building sculptures out of cutlery, or sitting in a corner of the gardens with a flashlight and a book. In the past week it's become so dark that Tarondor has taken to reading with a flashlight at all hours of the day. "My eyes are shitty enough already," he explained. "Don't want to ruin them even more."  
  
"I'm not upset," Beren says to the girl.  
  
"Really?" She furrows her brow. "Not at all?"  
  
Fortunately, at that moment Crazy Lou comes over again. "Hello, plump lemons. Are you ready to order?"  
  
"We'll just have the regular, I think," says the girl.

*

Since Crazy Lou currently has the monopoly on the restaurant market in Minas Tirith, one would expect that he might raise the prices to outrageous levels. But no, his rates are still very reasonable, and this is because Crazy Lou has a noble and magnanimous heart beating in his chest. He would never gouge his customers, never in a million years.  
  
The sushi is passably good, and Beren is pleasantly surprised.  
  
"Eat more ginger," says the girl. "It's good for you."  
  
"All right," he complies, picking up another ribbon of flesh-colored root. "So, what do you do for fun?"  
  
"Sleep, I guess," she replies. "Sit in the gardens. Play cards. Think about things. Bake."  
  
"I mean, what did you do before the Siege?"  
  
"Oh, much the same. I looked after my brother and my cousin and I talked to my mother. One of the other women taught me how to knit."  
  
"What did you knit?"  
  
"At one point I was knitting a scarf. But she never showed me how to cast off my stitches, so I couldn't finish it. It just got longer and longer, and now it's back at my house and it's still not finished."  
  
"Must be the longest scarf in Gondor."  
  
"I know. If the War ever ends, maybe I'll get to finish it, and then they'll put it in a museum as a memorial to the ennui of women." He smiles, and she seems pleased with this. "And what about you?"  
  
"I…" He pauses; he's having a hard time recalling. "Just spent time with the guys, I suppose. We'd just bullshit each other, see if we could get a rise."  
  
"Sounds funny."  
  
"Just passing the time, when there was nothing else to do. I don't have anything I'm really good at."  
  
"Me, neither."  
  
And he almost lets himself think about saying, Well, Tar' was the best bullshitter of all, though. Because he was smart; shoot you down with this smug-ass grin on his face, and all you wanted to do was punch his front teeth out, except you couldn't because you were laughing so hard. But Beren doesn't think it and he doesn't say it. It's just all shimmering lightly around the edges.  
  
"You're a good infantryman, though," she adds. "You must be good at that."  
  
"I'm okay. I'm mostly lucky."  
  
She pushes her sleeve up to dunk a piece of avocado roll in the dish of soy sauce, and her wrist looks tiny and fragile, as though she didn't have enough bone to fill out the mold. This is all just politeness-talk, he thinks. She's not particularly entertaining, and neither is he. He wants to tell her an amazing story, ask her a startling question, but nothing is coming to mind.  
  
"I'm sure you're very good. You must be."  
  
"No," he says. "No." It takes him a couple of seconds to realize that his face is wet. "Sorry."  
  
"That's okay." The girl waves at Crazy Lou. "Check, please."

*

Outside, he falls to pieces. It's like being cut with a very sharp blade; for a second you know it's happened but there's no pain, and then… The bubble's popped, the rainbow swirls are gone, and the inside of his mouth tastes like nothing but salt and bitterness. And Jesus, it hurts.  
  
"Goodbye, honeywheats," Lou had said solemnly, tipping his beret. "Franz Ferdinand had much pleasure in dining with you." He indicates the giraffe's head.  
  
"Goodbye, Franz Ferdinand," the girl said. And then Crazy Lou said something that Beren could not quite make out with the blood pounding mutinously in his ears the way it was. It could have been "dinner." It also could have been in Afrikaans, or perhaps in Arabic.  
  
Now Beren's choking and choking, his face in his palms. If he were to be buried with a proper headstone instead of just stripped of personal effects and piled on the fire, it would read, "Beren. Choked to death on Tuesday night. Wanker." And he realizes that that is something Tar' might have come up with, and he chokes harder.  
  
The girl doesn't say anything, and this makes him angry, as though she thinks she's being charitable with her silence. If she did say something, he'd probably be angry, too, but maybe not as much. And then he's angry at himself for being angry at her, angry at her for sitting here beside him when he doesn't want anything to do with her anymore. When he only wants his friend back. She puts her hand on top of his head.  
  
"Sorry," he says. He wipes at his eyes with his sleeve, hard enough, he thinks, to rub the skin off of his face.  
  
"It's okay."  
  
"It's not. I'm a shitty date." He's sweating into the bandage on his forehead, and the wound beneath it stings.  
  
"I've had worse."  
  
"No, you haven't."  
  
"Okay. Maybe not. But I think you're nice."  
  
"I'm not."  
  
"Then you're good at pretending."  
  
For a fleeting moment he thinks about taking a deep breath and grabbing her by the shoulders and kissing her passionately, the way a guy might in a really good or really terrible movie, her bones like tiny fish bones under her skin, and she would stiffen with shock, of course, but a second later she would kiss him back because she, too, would understand. But his face is gritty with dried tears and he's pretty sure his breath smells like ginger and soy sauce, and anyway she's probably not the type, and so the moment slinks away quietly.  
  
He straightens his neck, takes his face out of his hands. Her hand leaves his head.  
  
"I'll walk you back to the Houses," he says. "It's late."  
  
She nods, even though it's not really late at all.

*

On the way back, the air screams with noises of aerial bombardment.  
  
"The worst part," he says, "is the moment right before the impact. You're just waiting. You don't know how bad it's going to be."  
  
When she doesn't say anything, he turns and looks at her. She's pale and her face is frozen in a terrified flinch, her arms crosses tightly in front of her.  
  
"Oh," he says. "Oh, it's all right. They can't get us up here." Even though this makes no sense at all.  
  
"Really?"  
  
"Positive."  
  
"Oh." She uncrosses her arms. They've reached the wards. "Thanks for dinner," she says.  
  
"Thanks for coming with me."  
  
"Have a good night," says the girl he will one day marry, before she ducks back inside. "Come back if you need the bandage changed."

*

The barracks are dark and quiet, and he is grateful for that. His chest feels like his heart has been pared out with a dull knife.  
  
No, it doesn't, Tar' would have said. It's a lame-ass simile, and how would you know what that feels like, anyway?  
  
"Shut the fuck up," Beren says. "It's like that because I said so." Only as he pronounces the last word does he realize he's said it aloud. The other soldiers are peering at him curiously from their bunks.  
  
"Er. Sorry, guys," he apologizes.  
  
"No big deal," says a guy in a Seventh Infantry sweatshirt. The others go back to what they were doing.  
  
Beren reaches behind his pillow (and this hurts—see, Tar', it really does) and pulls out the bag he was given this morning, the bag he will later hand to Tarondor's mother and sisters, who will say, Keep it, we still have so many of things and you were as good as his brother. He takes out Tarondor's marked-up copy of  _Ecce Homo_ , and then he takes out Tarondor's flashlight and clicks it on. The beam is weak but it still works. The book's spine is broken in about forty different places and it falls open easily; he picks a random page and begins to read. He's never liked Nietzsche, and he told Tar' as much: reactionary loon. Soon he's not reading anymore, just staring at the words and the shapes and rows they make, and soon he's not even staring at the words, but just the yellowy-white spaces around them, the carved-up nothingness where they couldn't find anything to fit.


End file.
